Win 98 SE Password

I have an old Dell Windows 98 SE that still works and was being used only for my large model railroad inventory (cars and pubs). No password installed. CMOS battery replaced recently, now it demands a password. I tried booting with an emergency Win 98 floppy, no success. I have tried every old password I can think of, no success. I tried downloading a Win 98 password breaker. Since I have no starting point (hints) for the password cracker, it says it will take 248 years to crack it. (I should have backed it up but....)

Anyone have any helpful ideas? I tried removing and re-installing the CMOS battery, no change.

PCs of that vintage often had a jumper hidden somewhere on the motherboard which could be put across two pins to bypass any power-on password which might have been set. You would have to look at the documentation for the motherboard/PC.

That's unless you are referring to some completely different password!

You might try connecting the hard drive of the old Dell to a newer computer, and see if you can access your data on the newer computer. If that works, then copy your data to a newer medium (e.g. the hard drive of the newer computer), and you're done.

If you can't access the data from the newer computer, you might consider setting up a VM (virtual machine) in the newer computer, installing Windows 98 SE (or maybe XP) as your OS, and then connecting the hard drive from the old Dell to the newer machine. If you can get it working that way, you will have greatly stabilized your situation with regard to your railroad inventory, because you will have eliminated a seriously weak link -- the very old PC.

However you solve this, once you get it solved, I'd highly recommend that you do a backup, because the hard drive that the data is on is likely very old and therefore is another seriously weak link in this process.

Last edited by mrjimphelps; 2013-03-04 at 13:24.
Reason: spelling errors

If the problem was caused by replacing the battery....then something got scrambled in the bios. That's not unusual, when you take out a failed battery and put in a new one immediately.

Take the battery back out, with all power removed from the computer, and leave it out for about 30 minutes.
That will allow the programmable memory cells in the bios to totally drain. Then put the NEW battery back in and restore the line power to the PC, boot up and go right into the Bios, set the time and data and SAVE.

I seem to recall that Win 98's log-in password could be by-passed just by leaving the password field blank and hitting either the <enter> or the Escape key. If I'm incorrect, chalk it up to old-timer's disease affecting my RAM ;-)